


pluck me from the air, find nourishment in me

by kwritten



Series: Femlash February 2016 [7]
Category: Doctor Who (2005), The 100 (TV)
Genre: Clara-is-the-TARDIS, Crossover, Crossover Pairings, F/F, Femslash, implied - Freeform, implied clara/tardis, kindof
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-12
Updated: 2016-02-12
Packaged: 2018-05-19 21:03:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5980855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/pseuds/kwritten
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>for the prompt: clara/raven, flying vs falling</p><p> </p><p>  <i>She didn’t know what she was looking for, but the box did. That darling old blue box that loved her the way that the old family cat loved, always with their claws out ready to strike.</i><br/><i>A companion to a companion.<br/><i>They took to rescuing falling girls, plucking them right out of the air and setting them on their feet again. Like a mission or a calling or a desperate, driving need to find more things just like themselves.</i></i></p>
            </blockquote>





	pluck me from the air, find nourishment in me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [clytemnestras](https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/gifts).



Her grandmother used to say, _what the good lord doesn’t know, won’t hurt him_ , which ran contrary to everything she knew as a child to be true about the creature that the world called the _Good Lord_. And then she met Him.

Her _Him_. Possessive. Noun. _Hers_. Not hers.

There is no proper grammar for a person like him. He is outside the bounds of her inadequate language. But then, he has no words for her. So maybe it is true that they need each other.

Maybe that is the mark of _need_ , when you exist for the other person despite the fact that there are no words for how or why or what you are exactly.

He changed her world and she saved his from the start of his time forwards to hers and she was impossible and she was infinite and she found that, _what the good doctor doesn’t know, won’t hurt him_. (She wants to ask him if her grandmother belonged to him, but never does. He probably wouldn’t remember anyway. They are all truly _ghosts_ to him.)

The first thing that she hid from him was that his beautiful box loved her more than him. ~~She never tells him that can feel her own skin tingle when he presses his fingers into the controls even when he is a universe away.~~ It is, in fact, the only thing she hid from him – in the way that one lie always has a thousand siblings, jostling for attention.

 

The first time she left him behind, they were running down a corridor, her feet slapping against the ground, a breeze of motion in her hair, and she felt suddenly so inexplicably tired. As if this was the only thing in her life that she had ever done, running down corridors after a madman. She didn’t even realize that she had called TARDIS to her until she was already inside and they were flying flying flying.

 

It is easier to escape in the middle of a disaster, slip back in minutes hours months later without notice in the middle of a catastrophe. No one questions the withdrawn look of pain on her face. No one questions a sudden wardrobe change or a sunburned face or a haircut. No one notices the big changes of a life lived elsewhere in the split second between one blast and the next.

 

 

She didn’t know what she was looking for, but the box did. That darling old blue box that loved her the way that the old family cat loved, always with their claws out ready to strike.

A companion to a companion.

They took to rescuing falling girls, plucking them right out of the air and setting them on their feet again. Like a mission or a calling or a desperate, driving need to find more things just like themselves.

(She doesn’t remember falling, but then again she can’t recall every moment that her face has lived.)  
(She doesn’t remember falling, but then again maybe she never stopped.)

They took to rescuing falling girls, reaching out with Clara’s hands into cold or very, very hot moments and screaming, _take my hand_ , as if their words could make a difference.

 

 

Once, she reached out and felt fingertips for a millisecond before she was whirled away, dropped in a desert on an abandoned planet, surrounded by ruins. She felt a certain amount of kinship with the crumbling stone and that made her fake an anger she didn’t know in order to prove a point to herself that didn’t stick.

It only happened once, an error in calculation on behalf of them both, probably. A willful ignorance. A slip of their own knowledge.

That somewhere out there in the nexus of space and time, her face was falling falling falling ~~flying~~ and that was the one face they couldn’t save.

(She didn’t cry herself to sleep that night, but it felt like TARDIS did. A secret that should have been kept from her. A secret that she never admitted to herself.)

(And on her palm the memory of fingers she should never have felt.)

An impossible girl, that’s what he called her. And maybe he wasn’t wrong.

 

 

They take to plucking falling girls out of the sky because girls don’t have wings and they shouldn’t be in the air like that. It’s a calling, it’s a desperate need, it’s the opposite of companionship.

(They never said it was companionship, but at night she thinks that maybe it should be.)

 

 

“Hello sexy,” she used _His_ name because there was no other ~~and she wasn’t ready to say _me me me_~~. “Where are we off to today?”

Today is yesterday is last week is tomorrow is all of space and time and it feels like freedom in her lungs where there was only a journey before. Foolish people say that life is all about the journey, don’t look for the destination. She has lived a thousand lives, she knows that life is an intangible word that lingers on the tip of her tongue only when she is running and that doesn’t sound like a journey to her, it sounds like a last resort.

(Maybe that’s all she is, after all.)

Earth, her desperate and beautiful Earth, hung in space like a ball flung up in the air, stuck in the pristine moment before it must fall. Clara rested her shoulder against the door of TARDIS and smiled.

She’s seen a hundred thousand planets and none of them are home. She’s clinging to her home with her fingertips and her home is her own heart, she’ll lose it far too soon for any of this to matter. That planet, hanging before her face like an apple she could pluck and bring to her lips for sustenance, is just a weigh station; it weighed her and found her wanting. Too bad she never cared what it thought, otherwise its opinion might have mattered.

Something like a tin can with a girl inside, whooping with fear and joy in equal measure, sped past inches from her face and there was a mad dash, TARDIS keeping pace with a falling thing and Clara falling and a hand in hers and a girl gasping as they landed in a heap.

 

 

Her fingers have callouses that make Clara envious for the first time in her entire ~~thousand lives~~ life. Brown and thin and covered in memories that she cannot access. A million moments that she wasn’t there to hold those hands in her own, to kiss those lips, to wrap those long legs around her hips and smile into that smile and dream dreams of happiness and love and birds in flight instead of a hundred girls falling all around her ears.

“I’m falling,” she whispers and then laughs, laughs in spite of herself. Above her head, lights flicker in humor and delight and pleasure and all the emotions in her chest are reflected back at her in warm, brown, delighted eyes.

For the first time in her entire ~~thousand lives~~ life, she’s falling.

And may the _good lord_ help her, but fuck it all she doesn’t want to be caught.

Just wants to fall

                                 fall

                                                                  fall

                                                                                                   fall

                                 f  
                                                                  a  
                                                                                                   l  
                                                                                                                                    l

forever in the arms of a girl she plucked out of the sky.

“What the hell?” the girl spit out, pulling her helmet over her head.

“You were falling,” Clara panted, gesturing at herself and the _smaller on the outside_ they were nestled safe inside of. “I … _we_ saved you.”

The girl quirked one eyebrow and laughed, “Oh that wasn’t falling, that was _flying_.” She whistled low and spun around to examine her surroundings. As if she expected to land here, here in this impossible place on top of an impossible girl. As if a  TARDIS in the shape of a phonebox had been created just for the purpose of her walking about in it.

“I’m Clara,” she darted past the girl to enter something into the control panel, a lightness to her chest that had never been there before and she was afraid would slip out through her lips if she said too many words too quickly.

“Raven,” the girl said.

A bird                                  a bird                                  a bird                                  a

                                                                                                   raven

a girl that flew when the universe told her to fall.

Clara smiled at her, “Raven. Where would you like to go?”

She had never asked that before. Had never seen the need. Rescue, return, water, rinse, repeat.

The girl with wings smiled and it felt like an adventure.


End file.
